Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/386

 sleep. Towards daylight, as he was moving about on his couch without being able to repose, it suddenly seemed to him that he saw the shadow of the mysterious unknown appear before him. It was the same face wrinkled by grief; it was the same deep and devouring look. His poor habiliments showed, nevertheless, the style of a gentleman, who must have seen better days; and Siegfried remembered with regret that he had treated him thus cavalierly. He finally persuaded himself that the physiognomical expression of the unknown betrayed the anguish of a secret misery augmented by the aspect of a man still rich and whom fortune amused herself by goring with gold at a green covered table. He resolved to go and seek the stranger, cordially ask pardon for his rudeness, and offer him his assistance as delicately as possible.

It chanced that the first person that Siegfried met the next morning on the bather's promenade was this very stranger.

"Sir," said he to him, "I was one or two days ago rude and impolite towards you. I beg that you will allow me apologize." The stranger answered that Siegfried owed him no reparation; that all the wrong, if there were any, was on his part.

Baron Siegfried, piqued by the cool deportment of the gentleman, commenced, for the purpose of sounding him, talking about certain embarrassments in life which render the character hard, and cause the involuntary forgetfulness of what is due to courtesy. He tried to make the stranger understand, with all the skilfulness in such a case, that he should be happy to place at his service the sum he had won, if his luck at play could be transferred.

"Sir," answered the stranger, "you take me for a poor devil, and you are doing an act of liberality; but I am not yet deprived of all resources, for I have so few wants that it is easy for me to satisfy them at a trifling expense. If you think that you have offended me, it is not money that can sooth the pain that you have occasioned me."

"I think that I understand you," replied the baron, calmly,